Why Magento is the Right Choice for Building a Multi-Vendor Marketplace Platform
Each month more than 197 million people visit the website of Amazon. This simply indicates that people can't afford to neglect Amazon and it's the reason why it's emerged as one of the most popular marketplaces.
Each month more than 197 million people visit the website of Amazon. This simply indicates that people can just not afford to neglect Amazon on a daily basis and this is the prime reason why Amazon has emerged as one of the most popular marketplaces in the USA and the world.
We’re sure you must have ordered something at least once from the e-commerce giants like Amazon, eBay, Walmart, or Etsy. In 2019, these leading marketplaces amounted to dollar 2.03 trillion in sales.
Emarketer anticipates that the retail e-commerce revenue will expectedly reach US dollar 5 .514 trillion this year in the US alone.
Needless to say, all these retail giants show no signs of slowing down any time soon. So, what can you learn from these top marketplaces?
The success of these global retail leaders clearly demonstrates the benefits of building a marketplace in the current hyper-developing eCommerce environment.
Creating a Multi-Vendor Marketplace Platform
After considering these figures, it is not surprising that an increasing number of businesses are keen to tap into the multi-vendor marketplace business. But what is even more surprising is the ease with which you can create an Amazon or Flipkart-like multivendor marketplace store. By using the right technology, building a multi-vendor marketplace can be very efficient and simplified.
In case you decide to build your own marketplace, you will be the admin who will be responsible for most of the business and legal tasks. The benefits of running a multi-vendor marketplace are endless but some of the significant ones are the ability to attract a wide range of customers, easy promotions, potential multi-billion growth, and so on.
What is a Multi-Vendor Marketplace Platform
Multi-vendor online marketplaces provide opportunities for the development of both small-sized and large-sized businesses. Unlike traditional online stores and single-vendor online stores, the owner of a multi-vendor marketplace is not necessarily a seller. Multi-vendor platforms avail numerous opportunities that a single vendor online store cannot compete with.
You can create an online store like Etsy and only offer a platform for other vendors to sell their products or you can be like Amazon and offer your products alongside other sellers on your platform. Today, the chances of your multi-vendor Marketplace becoming successful are certainly high. Almost 47% of consumers prefer online marketplaces for their repeated purchases and 34% prefer online retailers and only 20% of buyers purchase directly from the brand itself. This shows that marketplaces demonstrate better results even in terms of customer retention.
Can a Multi-Vendor Marketplace Platform Help your Small Business Grow
The rising popularity of multi-vendor marketplace platforms among consumers and businesses is pushing the need for eCommerce platforms to expand their features to acquire a huge number and diversity of consumers.
By creating your own multi-vendor marketplace platform, you will be able to expose your business to a wide range of opportunities and a global base of customers and therefore increase your potential for accelerated business growth.
Right Platform: Magento
Once you decide to create your marketplace your first task is to find out the best solution that can allow your business to develop an e-commerce marketplace fast and within your budget. Magento is one of the most powerful e-commerce marketplace platforms in the industry that stands out among competitors all because of its powerful set of features, customization, and scalability.
Magento is a prominent name in the e-commerce platform world that can be the most suited and reliable platform for creating your multi-vendor marketplace platform. The Magento ecosystem is highly flexible, robust, reliable, and scalable and is highly reputed concerning multi-vendor marketplace platforms. Most of the essential features that are required in a multi-vendor marketplace are already available in Magento by default. More than that it delivers an outstanding blend of superior customer experiences with a future-ready PWA theme while also meeting vendor requirements.
With a gross turnover of more than 155 billion USD in merchandise trade and over 86,000 websites powered by Magento in the US alone, it is easy to believe why Magento can be the right platform for building your multi-vendor marketplace.
Exemplary features that make Magento one of the best options for business owners:
- ✓ High performance and reliability;
- ✓ More than 50 payment gateways;
- ✓ A large number of extensions in the module are available;
- ✓ Super easy integration with third-party software and API;
- ✓ Magento offers a free version that you can use without paying an ounce;
- ✓ Choose your ready Magento stores to provide full PWA support for a superior mobile experience and lightning-fast performance;
- ✓ Endless scalability and customization;
- ✓ Product search and dashboard functionality;
- ✓ With Magento, your business can get access to comprehensive management of orders including tracking features;
- ✓ The Magento platform provides a versatile feature set up inventory management tools including approval of product returns and exchanges;
- ✓ The Magento to marketplace platform is enriched with collaboration and communication features like custom customer emails delivery and order notes;
- ✓ A thorough invoicing system that provides ease of shopping to both customers and vendors on your platform;
- ✓ A wide range of payment and shipping options offered by Magento can make your marketplace the one-stop destination for a wide range of buyers;
- ✓ Managing and organizing customer data.
Benefits and Features of Magento Multi-Vendor Marketplace
Marketplaces come with three main modules:
- ✓ Marketplace for sellers;
- ✓ Marketplace for customers;
- ✓ Marketplace for admin/owner.
Each of the above parts has its own set of advantages. Before starting your Magento Multi-vendor marketplace development you first need to decide on the functionality. You can begin with basic features and then further add advanced ones with alterations to your e-commerce marketplace once you have successfully tested and assessed your idea.
We have jotted down all the features that constitute solutions for sellers, customers, and marketplace admins. Let’s have a look:
Magento Multi-Vendor Marketplace Benefits for Customers
Here is an overview of all the features for customers that you can enrich your Magento Multi-vendor marketplace with:
✓ Registration/Sign In
This feature can be implemented in your marketplace in different formats including registration and user verification with the email, social media, or phone number.
✓ Product search and filtering
The focus of this feature is to provide your customers a fast way of finding the products that match their needs. Therefore, you can add the feature that will help your customers to filter products by different attributes like size, color, brand, price, etc.
✓ Order processing and tracking
To improve customer satisfaction and reduce customer anxiety, the best way is to show the current status of orders. By adding this feature to your marketplace, you can enable your customers to track the order and see that their order is being processed.
✓ One-step checkout
The best way to reduce the increasing cart abandonment rates today is by introducing a one-step check-out in your multi-vendor marketplace. You can incorporate one-step checkout with social login for a prompt shopping process on your platform.
✓ Buyer seller chat
This feature enables your customers to have forthright communication with the vendors regarding their product queries inside a live built-in chat section.
✓ Product and seller review
Your marketplace must provide customers the ability to review the products and vendors and share their feedback on the shopping experience on your platform. Adding this feature to your marketplace will allow them to share their feedback about your marketplace as well.
✓ Wish lists
Customers generally like to add products that they can’t buy now to their personal checklist for future purchases. Adding the WishList feature will provide your customers the ability to add products to their WishLists.
✓ Purchase history
This feature provides an insight into the history of all the orders made by a customer. You can integrate this feature with order processing and tracking and further categorize it into a single page by providing statuses of fulfilled orders and those who are still in progress.
✓ Multiple payment gateways
With the help of multiple payment gateways, your customer gets a chance to pay for a product based on their chosen payment method on your Magento multi-vendor marketplace.
✓ Product comparisons
With the help of this feature, you can help your customers in making the right choice regarding the products by providing a brief comparison.
Magento Multi-Vendor Marketplace Benefits For Vendors
✓ Onboarding
A lot of marketplaces offer sellers the ability to place their products. Therefore, a quick onboarding process is beneficial because the sellers won’t need to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how things work on your platform.
✓ Sign up and sign in
With this feature, you can allow the assignment of a few managers to a single vendor account and the assignment of different roles to them. You can incorporate this feature with phone numbers, email, and social media.
✓ Product management
This feature allows vendors on your platform to add products in a fast manner and provide them the ability to bulk upload, quickly change information, update images, videos, etc.
✓ Vendor profile
This feature gives merchants the ability to manage their business info, add a new bank account, change data, etc.
✓ Order processing
The order processing feature for a multi-vendor marketplace can be applied to your platform in different ways. You can provide your merchants the features like notifications about new order transactions, changes in items, and provide them access to shipping method management.
✓ Buyer seller chat
This feature will enable sellers to quickly answer all product-related queries, help customers when they encounter difficulties, and provide other required information.
✓ Analytics dashboard
Providing access to an analytics dashboard will help your sellers with insights into their performance, best-selling products, conversions, etc. For this, you need to create an advanced, user-friendly, and interactive dashboard that will enable sellers to get access to useful data.
✓ Listing promotion feature
This important feature is included in most of the marketplace giants like Amazon and Etsy as it can help your sellers to convert more customers and for you to make money within your Magento multi-vendor marketplace.
✓ Multi-user access
Providing vendors multi-user access so that they could add their team members and assign different roles to them is one good feature to include in your multi-vendor Magento market marketplace.
Magento Multi-Vendor Marketplace Benefits For Admins
✓ Marketplace management tools
As an admin, you need to keep a check on all the operations occurring on the marketplace. Admins must be able to moderate customers, review sellers, and access other information. This feature helps them do the same.
✓ SEO management
With the help of this feature, admin can manage SEO strategies used within the platform and further regulate their convincingness.
✓ Multi-currency support
If you want to create a global marketplace or move your marketplace to the international stage, you must add multilingual and multi-currency support within your marketplace. This feature allows the admin to access the tools to control such operations and features.
✓ Analytics dashboard
This feature helps the admin to track the number of sales in the marketplace generated by the merchants and how much revenue the marketplace generated.
Final Note
Creating an online marketplace in today’s hyper-tech world is a great business opportunity and with Magento, it is the best way to move beyond the traditional online store. So, if you have an idea then today is the right time to pursue it and turn it into a successful business.
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